Galactic Civilizations III v2.6 (Released 10/12)

Galactic Civilizations III v2.6 (Released 10/12)

We have prepared a preview of our next big update that includes bonus starting citizens, more trade, better balance, and tweaks to make evil more, well evil.

Summary

Evil is better (and good is dumb): Many of the colonization events are getting a slight rework whereby the "evil" choice is somewhat more profitable than before. Also, the Malevolent ideology tree in Crusade is being tweaked to give a general bonus in negotiations rather than focusing on minors.

More Trade: We're slightly decreasing the amount of money from trade routes but substantially increasing the number of trade routes you can have. This makes trading empires a lot more interesting.

A citizen for you: Crusade owners will get a free citizen. This way, at the start of the game, they can make some tweaks to their economy.

New mission for you to accept: Crusade owners get a new a new mission to harvest Aurorus Trees.

Custom Factions for MP: Players can use their custom factions and fleets in MP games.

Ongoing Polish: Each time we play we find something to improve. We've also been working closely with the community to identify bugs and "quality of life" improvements for this update.

Please read below for details.

Base Game

Gameplay / Balance

Players can use custom factions in MP

High-level factories require Durantium to build.

Fusion Power Plant requires 1 anti-matter to build

Research Cloister Promethium cost reduced from 10 to 5

Cities can be built any number of times on a planet but now have 1 Promethium cost. The idea is that if you have lots of Durantium, you should probably build up with Factories. If you have lots of Promethion, you can build up with cities.

Prototype Hyperdrive base mass use reduced from 8 to 6 but now uses 10% of the ship's mass.

Prototype Hyperdrive moves reduced from 5 to 2 to conform to other component performances.

Thrusters made smaller but cost more.

Thrusters now faster.

Fixed typos in Tutorial_Refuge_FlavorText.xml and added in the tutorial text to explain changes from 2.5.

AI more careful about getting overextended with too many wars.

Ripe for conquest Diplomatic mod now takes more personality traits into account.

AI is a little more wary of going to war with lots of other players.

Updated description for personality traits to be more explicit in what they mean.

Changed planet word on the street text better grammar.

Building a shipyard with a constructor in crusade will now refund an administrator

Pirates are slightly more frisky.

Turn time improvement.

Made it so that the rename object dialog always appears on top (otherwise it has issues when bringing it up in places like the planet govern screen)

Fix for missing strings in base campaigns

Reduced power of some of the ideological events.

Slave trade route benefits balanced to not provide quite as much approval bonus as well as reduce production bonus.

Balance pass on base game improvements.

Political Mastery military manufacturing reduced from 20% to 10%

Planetology +1 raw production bonus removed

Starport level bonus increased from 0.3 to 0.5 military production

Space Elevator manufacturing level bonus increased from 0.3 to 0.5

Fusion Power Plant and other high-level mega improvements reduced in effect

Updated Mercenary abilities

Certain high-level improvements no longer provide an empire-wide bonus (particularly ones that can be built over and over...)

Drengin slave improvements don't increase population cap anymore.

More balancing to ideological events.

Pirate event more common

Evil motivation traits reduced from doubling to something more reasonable

Updated and rebalanced Mercenary components just for the Mercenaries DLC.

DLC Mega events:Pirates start with some techs that make them move faster, get some money up front.

DLC Mega events: The Artifact diplomacy points reduced from 5 to 1 so that you don't just instantly win.

Updated base game Manufacturing improvements to work better with the "All Construction" adjacency bonuses.

Map generation balance fixes to make Crusade/base game let idiotic in their resource generation.

Battle Initiation Window doesn't pop up when you are attacking an asteroid

Added a Crusade specific FOW coloring.

Added a Crusade specific starbox.

Increased number of trade licenses that techs provide

Tiny hull cost increased from 20 to 25

Tiny hull maint increased from 1 to 2

Tiny hull acceleration increased from 0.2 to 0.3

Tiny hull max speed increased from 0.2 to 0.3

Small hull cost increased from 30 to 40

Small hull maint increased from 1 to 2

Medium hull maint increased from 1 to 2

Large hull cost increased from 150 to 250

Large hull maint increased from 1 to 2

Huge hull maint increased from 1 to 2

Huge hull logistics cost increased from 12 to 15

Starbase maint increased from 1 to 3

Trade Route income reduced from 5% of planet income to 3%.

Snathi get 4 instead of 3 trade route licenses with Xeno Commerce in order for Stardock to survive their inevitable culling of Earth.

More typo fixes.

Rework to various colonization events to give the evil choice more goodies because evil will always triumph because good is dumb.

Starports now cost 1 maint.

UI

Added personality traits to Diplomacy Report Window

Fixed quirkiness with the "Allow Clear Queue" governor option

Fixed issue where having an empty modifier list in the improvement tooltip would mess up the display

Added confirmation for when obsoleting a ship design in the designer landing window

Added new hotkey for building asteroid mining base (defaults to "B")

Added tooltips to the fleet stats entry in the main game window saying what each stat represents

Fleets now use the closest star system plus roman numerals for their name when 'creating' a new fleet ('creating' meaning when a single ship becomes a fleet)

Fixed small space at the bottom of the command buttons list in base game mode

Added Design Author field to the ship style set editor that shows the ship design's author (hides if it's a core ship design)

Bugs

Fixed issue where the city improvements were showing as lit up and available to build when there were no more tiles left to place the city on

fixes issues with some hotkeys not working, like CTRL+S, as well as being unable to assign those keys with flags correctly

Fixed issue where fleets were getting hidden underneath things like asteroids and rally points when you select the fleet

Fixed issue where clicking on a different improvement in the planet's build queue would not update the Rush button's tooltip with the correct rush cost

Fixed issue where a few of the ship components with abilities were not showing up in the fleet/ship abilities list

Fleet/ship context windows are no longer rounding down numbers to the stat breakdown tooltip giving inaccurate info for the weapons and defenses

Erragis now correctly gives the kinetic damage reduction to all ships in the fleet, instead of just itself

Fixed error that was setting the wrong spinner for the custom faction's second material def

Precursor anomalies now correctly actually give Antimatter and Elerium when you survey them

Added checks to prevent asteroids related crashes.

Updated research video for base game tutorial.

You can longer upload cheesed factions to the workshop

Fixed issue where when the AI would fall-back to governors, the governor would queue up durational projects as regular improvements, causing the icon to show up on the colony map

Made it so that whenever a new governor is assigned to the colony, the governor takes action immediately, instead of waiting for the next turn

Added new checkbox to the Govern Planet and Govern Planet With Production Wheel windows that enables/disables allowing the governor to clear the production queue whenever a new one is assigned

Factions that start with techs no longer start researching a high level tech without your permission.

The economy dot on the production wheel no longer pops out on Govern screen

Fixed issue where base game "classic" saves weren't showing the message to load the classic branch in steam

Fixed issue where you could click a tab in the civ builder a second time to de-select it, which would then prevent the line next to it from un-highlighting whenever switching to another tab

Fixed an MP crash related to the godlike AI

Fixed issue where pressing the "save" button in civ builder wouldn't leave the civ builder when it finished saving

Optimized UI code to get a perf boost

Added base production points to manufacturing/research/income production tooltips

Fixed issue where functional components in the ship designer weren't taking the player's techs into account

Fix for issue where player made ship components would be loaded twice, showing up as duplicates

Fix for issue where DLC custom ship components would show up twice in the ship designer if launched from the main menu

Moved improvement gfx from Mercenaries to base gfx folder because Crusade uses them too

Improvements that use Arnor spice now charge you only once instead of every turn.

Increase drawing performance on higher resolution displays

Fixed the "Death Furnaces" ideology description to match its effect

Made the planet window not display manufacturing for military if the planet isn't sponsoring a shipyard

Eject all button on planet UI of planets that are not yours

Fix for odd behavior in MP that can result in a crash for the host in the United Planets system.

Disabled the required win ratio for UP resolutions because no one really understood it.

Fixed issue where the resource log wasn't being updated for administrators whenever you bought a mercenary

Fixed issue where you could get infinite legions if you had a stationed general on a planet

Crusade

Gameplay / Balance

Custom factions are available in MP

Research improvements now have a maint of 0.5

Research buildings no longer have a Promethion cost

Research-based Wonders require Arnor Spice to construct

There's no limit on the number of cities you can have on a planet but they now cost 1 promethion in addition to food. Again, the idea is that if you have lots of Durantium, use factories to increase the productivity of your population but if you have lots of promothion then people are probably a better bet.

Prototype Hyperdrive moves reduced from 5 to 2 to conform to other component performances.

Drengin labor camps and such only provide 0.1 population cap increases instead of a full point.

New mission: Aurorus tree expedition

AI is more careful about getting overextended with too many wars.

Ripe for conquest Diplomatic mod now takes more personality traits into account.

AI is a little more wary of going to war with lots of other players.

Updated description for personality traits to be more explicit in what they mean.

Changed planet word on the street text better grammar.

Building a shipyard with a constructor in crusade will now refund an administrator

Pirates are slightly more frisky.

Turn time improvement.

Made it so that the rename object dialog always appears on top (otherwise it has issues when bringing it up in places like the planet govern screen)

Fix for missing strings in base campaigns

Reduced power of some of the ideological events.

Slave trade route benefits balanced to not provide quite as much approval bonus as well as reduce production bonus.

Balance pass on base game improvements.

Political Mastery military manufacturing reduced from 20% to 10%

Planetology +1 raw production bonus removed

Starport level bonus increased from 0.3 to 0.5 military production

Space Elevator manufacturing level bonus increased from 0.3 to 0.5

Fusion Power Plant and other high-level mega improvements reduced in effect

Updated Mercenary abilities

Certain high-level improvements no longer provide an empire-wide bonus (particularly ones that can be built over and over...)

Drengin slave improvements don't increase population cap anymore.

More balancing to ideological events.

Pirate event more common

Evil motivation traits reduced from doubling to something more reasonable

Updated and rebalanced Mercenary components just for the Mercenaries DLC.

DLC Mega events:Pirates start with some techs that make them move faster, get some money up front.

DLC Mega events: The Artifact diplomacy points reduced from 5 to 1 so that you don't just instantly win.

Updated base game Manufacturing improvements to work better with the "All Construction" adjacency bonuses.

Map generation balance fixes to make Crusade/base game let idiotic in their resource generation.

Battle Initiation Window doesn't pop up when you are attacking an asteroid

Added a Crusade specific FOW coloring.

Added a Crusade specific starbox.

Increased number of trade licenses that techs provide

Tiny hull cost increased from 20 to 25

Tiny hull maint increased from 1 to 2

Tiny hull acceleration increased from 0.2 to 0.3

Tiny hull max speed increased from 0.2 to 0.3

Small hull cost increased from 30 to 40

Small hull maint increased from 1 to 2

Medium hull maint increased from 1 to 2

Large hull cost increased from 150 to 250

Large hull maint increased from 1 to 2

Huge hull maint increased from 1 to 2

Huge hull logistics cost increased from 12 to 15

Starbase maint increased from 1 to 3

Trade Route income reduced from 5% of planet income to 3%.

Snathi get 4 instead of 3 trade route licenses with Xeno Commerce in order for Stardock to survive their inevitable culling of Earth.

More typo fixes.

Rework to various colonization events to give the evil choice more goodies because evil will always triumph because good is dumb.

Epiphany now costs 2 instead of 1 Spice

Central Bank provides 1 wealth instead of 100% wealth (was a bug)

Central bank provides 1 wealth per level

Starports now cost 1 maint

Bureaucrats get 10 instead of 25 bonus administrative points.

New Improvement: Diplomatic Corps. Let's the player train Diplomats.

Players now start out with a leader.

Awe trait now provides benefit to all civs rather than just minors since you don't trade with Minors in Crusade

Interstellar governance now provides a leader upon researching

Republic government now provides a leader upon researching

Democracy tech now provides a leader upon researching

Star Federation tech now provides a leader upon research

Various high end diplomacy techs now provide a diplomat

Cultural Influence tech now provides a celebrity

Xeno Economics now provides an Entrepreneur upon researching

Xeno Farms now provide 0.5 food per level instead of only 0.3 (along with all the upgrades)

Various recruit projects on planets cost less but now require a special resource.

You can now recruit celebrities but you cannot yet eject them into space (patience).

With the espionage screen, can we have it so that when you look over another Civ's world to spy on their layout, when you click 'done' it sends you back to the main espionage screen so that I can quickly browse another planet in that civ's empire? Currently clicking 'done' drops you back to the main screen. I find this system gets in the way of the otherwise good espionage UI.

Slave trade route benefits balanced to not provide quite as much approval bonus as well as reduce production bonus.

What about malevolent societies that have no slaves? A malevolent balance pass should probably ditch or significantly rework a cultural choice that almost explicitly is Drengin-specific - and Snathi.

This is actually a frequent assumption - I had a Yor reference slaves in casual conversation, for example.

Eventually I might post information about the glitches I found in dialogue data - apparently when Crusade converted a bunch of species-specific dialogue to reference traits it converted some inappropriately specific conversation to general dialogue.

I had a problem when some of my ship designs were not appearing in the build list. It got worse when I noticed one of my enemies was using one of my missing designs against me. I eventually discovered in ShipHullStatDefs.xml that the mass limits for small, medium and large ships had been decreased. The limit for small ships decreased from 50 to 36, the limit for medium ships decreased from 75 to 60, and the limit for large ships decreased from 120 to 100. This is not in the change notes. The limits for other ship sizes were not changed. Were these changes supposed to be made?

im not sure if this is deliberate or not but when playing on an immense map with 16 empires at 'Godlike' I'm soon (within 10 turns) being buzzed by freighters from AI empires with a movement rating of 18 (I've managed to get mine to 5 movement). Likewise by turn 60, I'm seeing multiple empires with large ships of over 300 hit points. I know the AI gets a big buff at godlike but that seems OP! 3 games in now and starting to see 18 movement freighters again - it's depressing!

im not sure if this is deliberate or not but when playing on an immense map with 16 empires at 'Godlike' I'm soon (within 10 turns) being buzzed by freighters from AI empires with a movement rating of 18 (I've managed to get mine to 5 movement). Likewise by turn 60, I'm seeing multiple empires with large ships of over 300 hit points. I know the AI gets a big buff at godlike but that seems OP! 3 games in now and starting to see 18 movement freighters again - it's depressing!

thanks Daren

Hmm... is the AI constructing these freighters, or are they reward ships?

Preliminarily, I'd say 100 Cost, +1 Maintenance, +1 adjacency bonuses, +5% per level themselves, then +1 research (TDA), +1 All Production (DR), and +2 Wealth (PR), with a 3 resource cost for each (Thulium/Durantium/Prometheon for TDA/DR/PR). That makes them nice for the early game, but not really too useful later on.

If increasing the Space Elevator level bonus from +0.3 to +0.5 was called for, then the Deep Core Mine improvement should get the same effect. Otherwise, there's very little incentive to pick the DCM anymore, as a properly placed SE with bonuses can provide almost the same level of Social Construction as a DCM in the same place, PLUS the Ship Construction bonus.

E.g. currently a Level 3 SE provides 2.5 to both Ship and Social, while a Level 3 DCM provides only 3 to Social. That's pretty much a no-brainer for a cost of 1 maintenance. Fixing this would give the DCM a 3.5 Social, which gives a more meaningful choice.

Preliminarily, I'd say 100 Cost, +1 Maintenance, +1 adjacency bonuses, +5% per level themselves, then +1 research (TDA), +1 All Production (DR), and +2 Wealth (PR), with a 3 resource cost for each (Thulium/Durantium/Prometheon for TDA/DR/PR). That makes them nice for the early game, but not really too useful later on.

I am going to disagree as well. Leave the anti matter the way it is at +5. One per galaxy is why I race to reach it while searching and mining anti matter early in game.

Today's update appears to have reduced the population cap bonus on the Forced Labor Camp and its upgrades from 1 to .1. But the pop cap for the Work Camp is still 1! Why would anyone ever upgrade the work camp, especially since there's no benefit in better manufacturing stats to the forced labor camp?

I also noticed that "Malevolent - motivation III: Ruthless" ideology trait only gives 10% military production to the homeworld, instead of 100%.

Hi,

Each iteration of the game is different, of course and one big effect of this change which may or may not be have been intended is undermine the xenophobic trait since you really need three levels in of malevolence with the 100% bonus as previously to get any sort of decent ship production in the opening.

My feeling is that if you can survive the opening (I play at Genius and sometimes the starting position is really vile) then after a short flirtation with Malevolence to get +10 production on the home world, Benevolence wins out heavily. If you get the whole bottom row then that's fantastic but even if you don't then epiphany (as long as you can get Arnor Spice somehow) for the serious ship building and military techs is a game changer.,